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Take that, No. 2!

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Ted Rall

posted by Susan Stark

I just read in the news that the US military says that Al-Qaeda No. 2 has been eliminated.

I count myself as someone who is not subject to that particular disease called American Amnesia Syndrome, where inconvenient news is shoved down the memory hole as soon as Paris or Britney does something off the top. Yet I can’t remember for the life of me how many times Al-Qaeda No. 2 has been killed since 9/11 happened. I can probably estimate that No. 2 has been killed at least four times since that fateful day. He’s been killed two times in Pakistan, and two times in Iraq, according to my memory. The actual number of times he’s been killed is probably much higher than that. I don’t have the time or the energy to find out the actual kill score, because I would have to search through seven years of news.

You’ve got to hand it to No. 2. His powers of resurrection are astounding. And his name changes with each resurrection. Sometimes it’s Zawahiri, then it’s Zarqawi, and now it’s Qaswarah. No. 2 may be brilliant when it comes to rising from the dead, but he doesn’t have much creativity when it comes to re-naming himself. All three of these names sound far too similar to each other.

I kinda feel sorry for No. 3 and No. 4. They never get any attention from our brave troops. No bombs dropped on them at all. It’s always that blasted No. 2 guy. And of course it would never do to actually drop a bomb on the Big Number One Cheese himself, Osama Bin Laden. Because then everyone would be asking what took so long, and unfortunately Number One would have to inconveniently remain dead afterwards.

Fortunately, though, that venerable news source called The Onion may know how many times No. 2 has a-risen from the dead, because I sure don’t.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Stop the Bleeding

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Ted Rall

A Plan to Bail Out Scared Homeowners

  • Evictions must stop
  • Feds should bail out troubled homeowners
  • Government would take equity stake in home mortgages
  • Cost less than Iraq War


    • Unemployed and desperately worried about losing his home in a California gated community, Karthik Rajaram shot his wife, kids and mother-in-law before turning his new handgun upon himself. “We believe this individual had become despondent recently over his financial dealings and the financial situation of his household,” Los Angeles police said. One of his sons, age 19, was a Fulbright scholar.

    The previous week, a 90-year-old Ohio woman tried to commit suicide when cops tried to evict her from her foreclosed house. Fortunately, the gunshot wound wasn’t fatal.

    The financial crisis has claimed a number of lives, but few as poetically as that of Ian Beach of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Like a character in a Kate Chopin novella, the 47-year-old father of two “apparently took painkillers, drank a bottle of whisky and walked into the sea,” reported The Daily Mail in 2006, when the current epidemic of home foreclosures began to ramp up. “My trade in electronics gradually faded away and profit margins collapsed,” Beach explained in his suicide note. “I was not able to get another trade going to support us in time, and meanwhile debt built up. Bankruptcy was an option but the house problem was the last straw.”

    He figured his wife could use his life insurance to keep their family home. Guess again. Death by suicide is usually exempt.

    It’s time to stop the bleeding. It’s time to stop the evictions.

    We don’t want to repeat the Great Depression, when at least 23,000 Americans killed themselves. Moreover, foreclosure-related evictions destroy neighborhoods and further erode the economy. As newly homeless families wander the streets or couch surf with relatives, their empty residences become irresistible temptations for drug users, looters and vandals. Studies show that the average foreclosed home reduces the value of 48 neighboring houses by at least $5,000–in many cases, as much as $15,000. That’s a net total of nearly $250,000 in lost value for each foreclosed home.

    The median value of an American mortgage for 2005 (the most recent year data was available) was $93,000. Let’s look at how foreclosures are bad for everybody. If the guy next door is facing foreclosure, making your payments on time isn’t enough. It’s cheaper to team up with your neighbors and pay off your neighbor’s mortgage than to let his empty house lower your equity.

    Some people took out subprime mortgages they couldn’t afford. Do they deserve foreclosure? I don’t know. What I do know is that evicting homeowners hurts society so badly–in terms of increased homelessness, higher crime and healthcare costs, unemployment benefits paid to evicted people forced to move away from their homes, and reduced real estate values–that it ends up costing more than the amount of money owed.

    In Chicago, the Cook County sheriff has ordered his deputies to stop foreclosure-related evictions. “It’s one of most gut-wrenching things we do, seeing little children put out on the street with their possessions,” said Sheriff Thomas Dart. He said there has been an increasing number of renters–who have done nothing wrong and paid their rent on time–being thrown out of their homes as banks seize buildings from landlords who are in default. But his edict protects owners as well.

    Sheriff Dart is an American hero. Now we need a President Dart for the rest of America.

    It isn’t going to be John McCain. McCain’s proposed solution is the same tired litany of help-the-rich reductions of capital gains and dividend taxes Republicans have been pushing forever. Trust me on this, John: people getting evicted for defaulting on their mortgages don’t have capital gains or dividends to tax.

    There’s more hope with Barack Obama. The Democratic candidate has been apparently been cribbing from my 2004 book “Wake Up! You’re Liberal: How We Can Take America Back From the Right,” and I like it. He’s promoting my then-derided ideas for a tax break for companies that hire American workers rather than ship jobs overseas, and to abolish the despicable tax on unemployment benefits imposed by Ronald Reagan.

    On foreclosures, however, Obama is weak. He wants a 90-day moratorium on evictions. A nice start, but what happens after that? It’s not like the economy is going to recover any time soon.

    The right answer, the long-term solution, is to replicate the Wall Street bailout for individuals. It took a few weeks to get it right, but securities markets seem to like the coordinated effort by the European nations and the U.S. to pump cash into troubled banks in exchange for equity stakes–in effect, partial nationalization.

    And they said socialism was dead.

    The federal government should offer people (homeowners–not flippers, speculators, or owners of second vacation houses) the same deal as the banks.

    Let’s say you fall behind on your mortgage payments. A new government homeowner bailout agency–can we call it Teddie Mac?–offers you a choice. Option one: deal with the tender mercies of your lender’s Mumbai-based customer service reps. Option two: Teddie Mac pays your mortgage. Your lender gets paid. You stay in your home. The same offer applies to property taxes–we don’t want any “House of Sand and Fog”-type evictions either.

    What does Teddie Mac get? Equity in your home equal to the value of the payments you miss. If and when you sell your property, you settle up with Teddie at the closing. If the economy recovers and real estate prices resume their long-term climb, Teddie and the taxpayers make a profit. If prices stagnate or fall, it’s still worth it because society saves all those foreclosure-related expenses we talked about earlier.

    As of 2005 there were about 50 million home mortgages worth roughly $4.6 trillion. According to the experts, only about $1.4 trillion of that is at risk of foreclosure–and that’s the total, not the amount it would cost to stop evictions. If the feds were to take over payments in exchange for equity stakes in people’s homes–the same “partial nationalization” approach being applied to the big banks, remember–the net downside risk would be significantly less, probably a couple hundred of billion or so.

    In the worst-case scenario, bailing out homeowners would cost less–a lot less–than the cost of the war against Iraq. It’s less–a lot less–than the $700 billion-plus Wall Street bailout. It’s a hell of a lot less than the $5 trillion George W. Bush has added to the federal deficit.

    Otherwise, prepare yourself for more grisly tales of desperate homeowners with easy access to handguns.

    COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    Hate Mail of the Month Club

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    Ted Rall

    Just got this little note via e-mail:

    From: mark@gorhams.com
    I will just get right to the point.
    You are such a liberal piece of shit anti – American ass hole!
    There I said it……….Fuck you.
    Hugs and kisses fuck bag!!!
    Mark Zink
    Proud American

    Yes, it’s true. Amazingly, this fascist wrote from his work e-mail address. I wonder if his bosses know he’s using his work email to send hate mail full of obscenities?

    Insert Bowie Reference to “Changes” Here

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    Ted Rall

    The is under construction. You will note some interesting changes, however:

    • Improved Archives: The interface is now in reverse chronological order. Also, the long-lost 2007 and early 2008 archives are now available. They’re scrollable, rather than listed.
    • Easier RSS Feed
    • Emailable Posts

    Please bear with me as I make other changes and adjustments to the site. I’m trying to figure out how to do this stuff myself, since I can’t afford to pay a pro to do it.
    Thanks,
    Ted

    SYNDICATED COLUMN: If This Is The End of the U.S….

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    Ted Rall

    …Will Anyone Come To Our Funeral?

    Before I left for Afghanistan, the producer for my talk radio show asked me to return with a souvenir. “Bring me back an MRE [“Meal Ready to Eat”],” he requested. It was the fall of 2001, a few months into the U.S. invasion, and news accounts said Afghan skies were dark with millions of MREs dropped by U.S. warplanes to the starving masses.

    I never saw an MRE. Neither did any of the Afghans I talked to. As far as we could tell, the only stuff that American planes dropped on Afghanistan were bombs. Scattered in the rubble one could find the shards of said explosives, the well-known names of the defense contractors visible in black-stenciled English. Bombs: America’s biggest export. Food: not so much.

    I’m torn over what The Washington Post has so cavalierly dubbed “the economic apocalypse.” When I was 21, I prayed for this. The United States of America was the world’s biggest arms manufacturer and distributor, its filthiest polluter, the number-one defender of dictators and enemy of democracy, and earth’s most insidious purveyor of laissez faire, to-hell-with-you capitalism. It still is. But now I’m 45. I’m vested.

    I have equity, a retirement plan, a car. CDs and DVDs and gadgets to play them on. Lots of books. I have jobs–several of them, irony of ironies, that involve criticizing this rotten, corrupt and broken system. Events my younger self would have welcomed–multinational corporations laid low, billionaires reduced to penury, business-sucking Republicans forced by the failure of capitalism to pay lip service to the need for government regulation, the U.S. bankrupted into slashing its aggressive military–now scare the hell out of me. What if I can’t make my mortgage? What if we disintegrate like the Soviet Union? What if I turn the valve and water doesn’t come out? Middle-Aged Ted doesn’t want to lose his stuff.

    Or his friends. Some of them would die if they couldn’t get their meds anymore.

    Young Ted pipes up.

    “What about the Afghans those Made-in-USA bombs blew up?” Young Ted asks. “Wouldn’t they have been better off if Thomas Jefferson and his drinking buddies had never thought up the United States of America?”

    “I’m middle-aged,” snaps Middle-Aged Ted, “not senile. I know my Howard Zinn.”

    If the U.S. vanished from history, a couple million Vietnamese (and their kids and grandkids) would still be around. As would a million Iraqis and maybe a hundred thousand Afghans. The polar ice cap, melting so fast that nothing can save it, might still have stood a chance if the U.S., which produces 22 percent of greenhouse gases (440 percent more than its fair share) had never been.

    Americans aren’t just cruel and inconsiderate to the rest of the world. They treat each other like crap, too.

    As New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman points out, the last three decades have seen a “narrow oligarchy” arise in the Land of the Free to Die on the Street. “Income at the 99.9th percentile [over $400,000 a year] rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile [over $6 million a year] rose 497 percent,” wrote Krugman. Most people saw their income shrink.

    This is the rancid economic model–no unions, no safety net, no healthcare–the U.S. wants other countries to copy.

    It’s too late to save Bangladesh, polar bears, Moammar Khaddafi’s young daughter, the 290 people on Iran Air Flight 655, or the men we tortured to death at Gitmo. But there’s still the future to consider. If the U.S. government collapses and the markets implode and our consumer culture crashes, and Americans become too poor to invade other countries and drop bombs and impose murderous trade embargos, and we can’t overconsume and pollute like we used to–well, there’s no telling how many species might be saved from extinction. Thousands, probably more like millions, of people who otherwise would have been killed in some pointless future U.S. war of aggression will live instead of die.

    Young Ted has a point. “You’re worried about your new LG flat screen,” he sneers, “but you should be thinking about all those Iranians Bush or McCain or Obama is gonna blow up to keep the electricity on and that HDTV picture crisp and clear.”

    Middle-Aged Ted looks at Young Ted. “Make sure you hang on to that Dead Kennedys concert T,” he advises him. “It’ll be worth some serious coin on eBay someday. And how come you’re so skinny? All you eat is pizza.”

    “Don’t change the subject, old man,” he shoots back. “The glory of Rome relies on the screams of the crucified in Judea. Oppression and injustice aren’t hypocritical deviations from American principles. They fuel the entire system.”

    “Easy for you to say,” I–um, Middle-Aged Ted–replies. “I remember being 21. I didn’t have anything to lose. I was a college dropout, drowning in debt. Our apartment got robbed so often that, by the end, they were coming back for the lightbulbs. You made $620 a month and paid $425 in rent. Of course economic collapse didn’t scare you. ‘Mad Max’ would have been an improvement.”

    For the first time, a look of sympathy crosses my svelte doppelganger’s face. “Admit it, Middle-Aged Ted,” he says. “You’re scared you’ll end up like those Afghans–dirty and poor and, sooner rather than later, dead from a bomb dropped by one of the many countries we worked so hard to piss off. You’re so scared that you’re afraid to cheer when the biggest force for evil in the world is teetering on the edge of oblivion.”

    You got me, kid. I admit it.

    COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

    Ted Rall in The Washington Post

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    Ted Rall

    Today’s Washington Post has an interview with me. I love the writer and he did a great job deleting my ums and ers, but phone interviews always make me sound even stupider than I really am.

    SYNDICATED COLUMN: Mad Money

    •
    Ted Rall

    A Broke America Can’t Afford Wars, Tax Cuts

    Credit has dried up. The stock market is disintegrating. Unless someone pours money into capital markets, everyone agrees, we could wind up like people in Baghdad, fondly remembering the day five years ago when they pushed the handle and their toilets still flushed. Only one “someone” has enough cash to fix the problem: the U.S. government.

    The Bush Administration and Congressional Democrats want taxpayers to pay $700 billion to bail out failing banks. Progressives would prefer to bail out homeowners facing the imminent foreclosure of their homes, as well as those in danger of being foreclosed upon during 2009, at a cost of $1.3 trillion.

    Never mind which approach is better. Where will the government find the money?

    There are two elephants in the room: war and Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. We can’t afford either. Yet, to abuse the animal metaphor, everyone acts like they’re sacred cows.

    When you think about it, it’s sheer madness. The city marshal is at the door, brandishing a shotgun, ready to evict you and your family for nonpayment of rent. But while your kids are screaming in terror, you’re at the computer, wasting thousands on online gambling. You could pay off your landlord instead. You could make the marshal go away. All you have to do is stop. But you keep on keeping on. Click, click. More money squandered.

    What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell is wrong with us?

    In 2007 the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the final cost of our biggest national compulsion, the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, could total $2.4 trillion, or $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country. That’s twice as much as the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf Wars combined. It’s also two-thirds the cost of World War II. Yet no one–not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the media, not even the left–insists that we get out.

    To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, I’ve studied World War II. World War II was a worthwhile war, one that freed millions from tyranny and set the stage for the U.S. to dominate he global economy and become the wealthiest nation in history. Iraq and Afghanistan? They’re no World War II. As wars go, they’re not as worthwhile as the invasion of Grenada.

    “The CBO estimates assume that 75,000 troops will remain in both countries through 2017, including roughly 50,000 in Iraq,” reported USA Today. If anything, that’s a low-ball estimate. More than a half century after the fighting ceased, we still have 37,000 troops in one tiny country, South Korea. And both McCain and Obama promise to send more troops to Afghanistan. That means more taxpayer money.

    Nearly two out of three Americans think invading Iraq–where the lion’s share of war funding is being spent–was a mistake. The Afghan resistance is kicking our butts. Both wars have been a complete, total waste of money, effort and lives. As surely as the sun will rise in the east, we will lose both. At a total cost of at least $2.4 trillion. Ridiculous.

    $2.4 trillion is nearly twice the $1.3 trillion it would take to save every home in danger of foreclosure. That would keep many banks afloat, and act as the biggest economic stimulus in history. Can anyone sane tell us why we shouldn’t bring our troops back home? Can anyone justify wasting $2.4 trillion at a time when the U.S. economy is staring into the abyss of total collapse?

    The other national obsession is the tax cuts Bush pushed through in 2001 and 2003. “The surplus is not the government’s money,” Bush said at the time, apparently unaware that the economy was already in a recession. “The surplus is the people’s money.” Remember surpluses? Such a Clintonian word. Anyway, Democrats in Congress–still in full-on wuss mode following 9/11–went along with Bush’s tax cuts. But, bless their wimpy little heads, they did manage to extract a concession: In 2011, tax rates would revert to what they’d been in 2001.

    Believe a Republican once, shame on you. Believe a Republican twice, what were you thinking? Now so-called conservatives are complaining that “the largest tax increase in history” will occur in 2011 if Bush’s tax cuts are allowed to expire.

    Making the Bush tax cuts permanent would codify the most regressive tax change in history. “After-tax income would increase by more than six percent for households in the top one percent of the nation’s income distribution, two percent for households in the middle 60 percent, and only 0.3 percent for households in the bottom 20 percent,” found a Brookings Institution study.

    Making the rich richer will cost the Treasury an arm, a leg, and the better part of a torso.

    “Combined with a minimal but necessary fix to the government’s Alternative Minimum Tax, making the tax cuts permanent would reduce federal revenues by almost $1.8 trillion over 10 years–and that’s in addition to the $1.7 trillion of revenue losses already locked into law.”

    $1.8 trillion. Again, allow me to remind you: $1.3 trillion is the amount we need to stave off imminent financial catastrophe.

    That sound you hear is the door breaking down. The marshal is coming down the hall. Get off the computer. Fix the problem. Get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Let the tax cuts expire.

    COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

    The Morning After

    •
    Ted Rall

    Actually, the evening after. After the election, that is.

    I’ll be joining Lizz Winstead and other pundits to discuss the bloody aftermath at the 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side of whatever’s left of Manhattan. Info, including advance ticket purchase, is below:

    “We Have a Winner”
    Wednesday, November 5
    8:00 PM
    92nd Street Y
    New York NY
    Moderated by “The Daily Show” co-creator and acclaimed political humorist Lizz Winstead, “We Have a Winner” will take a look back, forward (and sideways) at the Presidential Election and State of the Union with some of the most insightful and hilarious political minds today – with Roseanne Barr, Monica Crowley, Robert A. George, Baratunde Thurston and Ted Rall.
    Click here to buy tickets.

    SYNDICATED COLUMN: Bush, Congress Party Like It’s 1929

    •
    Ted Rall

    Save People, Not Bankers

    Seat belt laws embolden drivers to drive faster, causing a net loss of life. It’s the law of unintended consequences, also known as the Peltzman effect: the safer you feel, the more risk you take.

    Sam Peltzman, the economist after whom said effect is named, says that government bailouts like the Bush Administration’s $700 billion attempt to stave off economic collapse are no more effective than “pouring money down a rat hole.” Moral hazard–rewarding reckless people and companies while allowing responsible ones to fail (hello, Lehman Brothers) may avert one economic crisis while planting the seeds of a worse one down the road.

    “In the long run,” says Peltzman, “you’re just laying the groundwork for more because you’re giving people an incentive to take too much risk, where a big part of the risk gets laid off on the taxpayer.”

    I don’t think much of the laissez faire, magic-of-the-marketplace, let-’em-eat-flat-screens school of Darwinian economics flogged by the University of Chicago, where Milton Friedman once reigned supreme and Peltzman is a professor emeritus. But I think he has a point here–with a twist. Government intervention is appropriate and necessary during tough economic times. But not if you bail out corporations.

    The 1979 Chrysler bailout is a perfect example. Jimmy Carter’s $1.2 billion loan sent an unwholesome message to Detroit: don’t change a thing. If you get into trouble, the government will rescue you. The Big Three kept selling gas guzzlers. Nimble foreign automakers that spent the 1980s and 1990s developing hybrid technology are crushing them now.

    More recently, the government bailed out the airlines after 9/11, notably by limiting negligence lawsuits by relatives of victims. It’s hardly a coincidence that the major carriers haven’t done much to improve security. Similarly, it’s hard to see how U.S. taxpayers will benefit by lending my former employer Bear, Stearns $29 billion to facilitate its sale to JPMorganChase. Bear’s corporate culture, reeking of the testosterone-drenched arrogance of its seven-figure-salaried executives, led it to fib about the worth of the collateralized debt obligations that supposedly guaranteed the payment of its subprime mortgage hedge funds. When traders learned the truth, confidence in the firm collapsed, sealing its fate.

    Or would have, if the feds hadn’t come along. Letting Bear go under might have prompted caution among future wannabe Masters of the Universe. If capitalism survives this debacle, we’ll see more like it as a result.

    Democrats are asking for some laudable amendments to Bush’s plan. They want to give bankruptcy court judges the power to reduce monthly mortgage payments, cap executive salaries, and increase Congressional oversight of the financial services companies involved. Good ideas, but none go far enough. Besides, they’d expire at the end of 2009. Does anyone think the economy will be booming by then?

    At least four million people–nine percent of all homeowners–have fallen behind on their payments or are in foreclosure. And 6.5 million more could go down the tubes next year. “People with poor credit have been defaulting on mortgage payment in large numbers for more than a year,” says Douglas McIntyre, an editor at 247wallst.com. “Now the problem has moved to homeowners with reasonably good credit.”

    Each family that loses their house creates a ripple effect. Empty homes lower their neighbors’ property values. Some dispossessed workers, unable to find a new place near their jobs, become unemployed. Savings are wiped out. Forced to move, parents pull children out of school, disrupting their education in ways that will hurt them and society decades from now. Banks are burdened with the costs of maintaining property they don’t want until they can unload it at a reduced price–further depressing real estate prices. Society, even renters, has an interest in preventing foreclosures.

    The unpredictable nature of the current real estate price plunge has created another set of problems. Tobin Harshaw of The New York Times sums up a complicated mess as nicely as anyone I’ve read: “There are a whole bunch of mortgage-backed securities, the value of which is not known, because nobody knows what the default rates on the underlying mortgages are likely to be.” Investors can’t set prices, much less invest, without reliable information. So credit markets have seized up.

    Americans are peering into the abyss, a.k.a. the End of Everything As We Know It. So whom are we counting upon to save the day? The same Bushist dead enders and Congressional layabouts who let Osama bin Laden live and New Orleans die.

    So yeah, we’re toast. But let’s talk about what should be done:

    1. Declare a Bank Holiday. As FDR did in 1933, Bush should shut down the financial system–banks, stock and currency exchanges–for a week or so to avoid panic selling, cool down market volatility, and give Congress time to craft carefully considered legislation rather than the spend-a-thon slapped together over the last Black Weekend. It bodes ill that liberals and conservatives alike have so little faith in the plan. Take some time; get it right.

    2. Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act. The current mortgage meltdown couldn’t have happened without Senator Phil Gramm, now a key economic advisor to John McCain. In 1999 Gramm led the repeal of the Depression-era legislation that had separated commercial from investment banks, allowing Citigroup and other companies to sell mortgage-backed securities that blurred the line between Main Street and Wall Street. Let the financiers handle derivatives, structured investment vehicles, and other arcane financial instruments. Banking should return to its dull, staid roots as a business that pays interest on deposits and collects interest on loans without imperiling those deposits.

    3. Bail out homeowners, not lenders. Stop doling out hundreds of billions, even trillions, of dollars, to a few banks and issue the cash to the disaggregated tens of millions of Americans who will spend the money and stimulate the economy instead. Which brings us to…

    4. Abolish predatory interest rates. Millions of people in danger of losing their homes would not be in trouble if their banks weren’t charging usurious interest rates. Every primary homeowner should be automatically refinanced to a floating 30-year mortgage, with the interest rate set at 1/4 percent point above the fed funds borrowing rate. Similarly, all consumer credit card debt should be refinanced to prime plus 1/4. The same goes for student loans. Secondary and vacation homes don’t qualify. Unemployed homeowners can apply for hardship deferrals, allowing them to skip mortgage payments until they find a job. Payday loans ought to fall under similar guidelines. In Utah, the average interest rate on payday loans is 521 percent! Of course, reforms will cut deeply into lenders’ earnings. Many banks would be at risk of going under, which is why…

    5. Banks that fail should be nationalized. As should investment banks and any other institution that needs federal taxpayer money to avoid failure. If we the people fund ’em, we the people own ’em. If and when the economy recovers, the Treasury collects the spoils and cuts our taxes.

    6. Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, and slash defense spending. Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, tells USA Today the government may have to cover $1.4 trillion in bad mortgage debt. That’s a lot of money, but I have good news: we can get it. In 2007, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq would cost at least $2.4 trillion through the next decade–even more if Obama or McCain keep their pledges to send more troops to Afghanistan next year. Cutting our losses and cutting the $515 billion a year Defense Department appropriations budget would help finance the clean-up of the mortgage meltdown.

    (C) 2008 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.

    Ted Rall Gets Animated

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    Ted Rall

    Here it is–my first animated editorial cartoon: “President Obama’s First Day.” It is also available at YouTube.

    I wrote, drew and designed the characters for “President Obama’s First Day,” a tongue-firmly-in-cheek look at liberal Democrats’ fantasies of how an Obama Administration would instantly change things for the better.

    The animation was done by David Essman (see biography below).

    There are some great Flash-based edittoons out there, but they take a different approach than I do. I see each animated cartoon as a skit, as a mini TV show. I hope people enjoy watching ‘Obama’s First Day’ as much as David and I enjoyed making it.

    I plan to continue releasing Web-based animated cartoons.

    Bios, for those who care:

    Ted Rall, 45, is President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. A nationally-syndicated editorial cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, Rall’s cartoons have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek and more than 200 other publications. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1996, and twice won first place in the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards.

    David Essman is a 22 year old animator, currently studying at The
    School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His films have been screened
    across the country at film festivals including San Francisco Shorts,
    Animation Block Party, and the St. Louis International Film Festival.

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